Peter Kronfeld, born in 1962, has always taken great interest in the subject of technological change in the economy, society and business. This already started when he was a student of economics and communication and he has been keeping track of these topics as a journalist and as managing director of HighTech communications GmbH until today.

ASM Assembly Systems founded the ADAMOS joint venture (www.adamos.com) together with leading equipment manufacturers in other industries, such as DMG-Mori, Zeiss, Dürr, to establish the cloud infrastructure and related services for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The members intend to develop applications and offer them in their own stores on the basis of the ADAMOS platform. Together with The Hermes Standard for the non-proprietary exchange of board-related information along the SMT line (as the modern successor of SMEMA), ADAMOS is already ASM’s second major data integration initiative. At the Productronica I had the opportunity to talk with Hubert Egger, Director Factory Solutions and responsible for ADAMOS at ASM.

What is ADAMOS?

Hubert Egger: “ADAMOS is first-of-all a joint venture of leading manufacturing equipment makers for various industries and a major IT company like Software AG. More than 200 IT experts will work for ADAMOS on building a powerful cloud platform and develop basics like platform services, APIs, analytics software, interfaces, etc. We will also establish an app factory to set the organizational framework for app developments by defining standards, commissioning generic apps and organizing marketplaces. Based on this foundation, we will establish with ASEMO a marketplace for electronic manufacturers and develop our own apps and software development kits.”

Don’t major IIoT platforms like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service and others already exist? Why do you need a separate platform?

Hubert Egger: “Most of these platforms were established by IT giants. As a result, they feature virtually no domain and process knowledge from the electronics manufacturing industry and other industries. Most platforms are highly generic. As a single equipment supplier, we cannot develop our own IIoT platform, because we don’t have the financial and personnel resources for its sustained operation. But together with other equipment makers we can, and we can play a role within ADAMOS to represent the needs of our customers with regard to their production processes and the integration of electronics manufacturing machines. ADAMOS will develop, operate and maintain the platform and basic services, while we and equipment suppliers from other industries link the machines and develop apps.”

Will all apps in ASEMO be supplied by ASM?

Hubert Egger: “No, of course not. It is an integration platform. It can accommodate machines from other makers. Based on the software development kits, equipment suppliers as well as third parties such as software companies can develop and offer their own apps.”

What types of apps do you have in mind?

Hubert Egger: “I am thinking of apps for monitoring multiple locations that let me check the status of lines and whole factories from anywhere with any web-capable device. But there is more. Another interesting field is predictive maintenance, for which we demonstrated a first app at the recent Productronica. An SX placement machine in a plant in Poland was monitored with various built-in sensors and the data transmitted via a hub and LTE links to the cloud, from where the app took the information and visualized it. This allows you to draw conclusion regarding the machine’s maintenance requirements.And you don’t always need apps. Many electronics plants are under pressure from their internal or external customers to provide more and more real-time information about the job or line status, as well as process data. With IIoT platforms you can meet these needs on the basis of established IT standards without incurring huge expenses for both parties.”

What does the schedule look like? When will the apps be available on your marketplace? And how much will they cost?

Hubert Egger: “The ADAMOS partners have agreed that the first apps will become available in their respective shops in the first quarter of 2018. ADAMOS was just founded, but thanks to our partner Software AG we do not start from scratch. The schedule is ambitious, but doable. The business models are still in flux as well, but they are definitely based on the pay-per-use/pay-as-you-go concept. This will allow you to consider factors like the number of connected machines and users, as well as the customer’s need for processing power and storage capacity.”